Events

Of Diet and Profit: Food Scarcity and Subsistence Protest in Nineteenth-Century Iran

September 27, 2018 - 6:30pm to 8:00pm

Speaker:

Ranin Kazemi

Event Sponsor:

Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies

Food scarcity and famine were a recurrent phenomenon in pre-modern Iran. Reports of mass starvation or protest, suicide, and even cannibalism because of food shortage are especially numerous in the nineteenth century. This lecture discusses the factors that led to repeated crises of subsistence in this period and explains what social and political significance it had for modern Iran.

Ranin Kazemi is Assistant Professor of History at San Diego State University. He studied History at Yale University and has previously taught courses in World and Middle Eastern History at Yale and Kansas State University. Kazemi has published a series of research articles on the history of famine, tobacco trade, consumer culture, and social protest in early modern Iran in the journal of Iranian Studies, Journal of Persianate Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Modern Asian Studies.